[Every other week, Gamasutra examines the fastest-growing Facebook games (according to monthly active users), looking at which titles and developers are having the most success attracting new players on the social network.]
Electronic Arts and PlayFish's The Sims Social, which has seen steady and rapid growth since its launch a month ago, is once again the "top gainer" this week, crossed the 50 million mark last week. It picked up 15.5 million new users and reached 51.5 million total monthly players.
Based on EA's long-running and popular Sims franchise, it's now the second biggest game on the social network in terms of monthly audience, second behind only Zynga's CityVille (74.2 million users), and ahead of Empires & Allies (37.3 million) and FarmVille (36.5 million).
Zuma Blitz is the second fastest-growing game this week, now with 5.7 million players. The PopCap-developed puzzler originally launched in December 2010, and grew its userbase by 36 percent in the last seven days as it attracted 1.5 million new users.
Social Point's strategy RPG Social Empires is #3 with 1.1 million new users and a 6.2 million total, followed by FarmVille with 726,328 new users, and FrontierVille successor Pioneer Trail with 718,699 new users and a 20.7 million total -- the latter two both being from Zynga.
Two titles from German social game maker Wooga take the sixth and seventh spots: Magic Land, which launched just last month, and has 657,450 new users and a 3.7 million total; and Diamond Dash with 642,286 new users and a 12.7 million total.
At #8 is 6waves/LOLapps' Mystery Manor with 642,113 new users and a 3.6 million total. After that, there's MiniMax's suspiciously familiar 水果忍者 (literally "Fruit Ninja") with 425,761 new users and a 2 million total, and MindJolt's Bubble Atlantis with 419,420 new users and an 879,160 total.
The full list of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts, are as follows:
All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.
